Blyth Describes Impact of UK Election

May 8, 2010

"You could hardly have engineered a worse result," Watson Faculty Fellow Mark Blyth told NPR following Thursday’s election in the UK, citing difficulties in forming a new coalition government among the implications.

In the runup to the election, Blyth also co-authored an article for Foreign Affairs calling it a referendum on the country’s last 30 years of evolution from a manufacturing economy to a center of global finance. The article “Labour Pains,” concludes that: “Languishing in recession, unable to project force, and unwilling to engage with others, Britain may turn inward and rethink its legacies – institutional and economic, domestic and foreign. The upcoming election is nothing less than a referendum on leaders and policies past. The outcome of that referendum will become the frame for where the United Kingdom will go next.”